I recall Grace Hopper of the US Navy carrying around a piece of wire abt 8 in long to remind people this is the distance light travels in a nanosecond. For most clients a few nanoseconds more may not matter, but closer to the customer is definitely better.
Closer to a foot…I attended one of her talks way back.
Mike
It is a bit farther than that but not much. Data centers (for most applications) need to be reasonably close to population centers to reduce latency. Balancing that are things like land and energy costs, energy availability in general, and tech companies also want carbon free energy.
Data centers are being built everywhere, but construction is really booming in places like Ohio, Iowa, Nebraska, Illinois, and Virginia, which hit the sweet spots. There are lots of data centers in the Columbia River valley because of cheap power and cheap land, but it isn’t really a boom area because of lack of population. There are lots of other places were data centers could/should be located, but there simply isn’t enough power.
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Experts tell us that when cities form at the intersection of major east west and north south roads, the population tends to follow a diamond pattern. Its as though driving time to downtown is the main factor. Population builds up along the fast main roads but less so on the slower diagonals.
In St. Louis, the rapid development goes abt 56 miles west on I-70. Some are willing to go as much as 80 mi for lower cost housing but 56 miles is convenient–maybe 30 min commuting time to some major employers in western suburbs.
So 100 miles is probably plenty. 50 miles or so will work. And maybe less if you are willing to build on the diagonals (ie out in the boonies where transportation is slower).
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The guys writing press releases are saying this. The bean counters won’t like it.
Do you think Mark Zuckerberg asked the question, “How much is this going to cost”? That’s a big reason why they issued the Request for Proposals. RFPs are issued to see who the interested bidders are, and what their prices might be for a given number of megawatts. Hopefully, the bids will also include an approximate timeline for eventually supplying the megawatts.
There is a long way to go before Mr. Zuckerberg begins spending his $ billions on these power plants. But he already knows it is going to be multiple billions. Same goes for Bezos with his project in Washington, Bill Gates with his project in Wyoming, etc.
_Pete
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However, that doesn’t fit well with the widespread occurrence of beltways and interstates that make circles around a city.
But probably not important to the siting of power plants.
DB2
In St Louis the population density and many large businesses are already outside the beltway–I-270 here.
Downtown is losing its luster except for sports, tourists, and govt. Brown fields are costly to develop and getting people to commute there is problematic. Lack of open space to build is a limitation. Far exurbs are cheaper and more attractive.
And for power plants cooling water and grid connection can be important.
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Honestly I see you are sophisticated.
But god are you being naive.
We have a city center in West Hartford that is very rich. Huge tourist destination as well.
Years ago a father and son bought the movie theater to get a bunch of office space. The town zoning demanded plans for expanding the parking lot.
So the son a lawyer developed plans for a second level over the open air parking. There was no other place to put more cars.
Zoning got the plans and okayed the office space.
The extra level parking was never built.
You like the way it sounds. That does not make it real.
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But when you can’t wait…
The 4 million square foot, $10 billion facility, hailed by Louisiana governor Jeff Landry as “a game changer,” is one of the largest private capital investments in the history of the bayou state and will be Meta’s largest-ever datacenter, the Facebook parent said…
Meta has decided to jump the atomic gun with this project by partnering with Entergy instead. The power generation company plans to construct three combined-cycle combustion turbine (CCCT) plants with a total energy generation capacity of 2,262 megawatts…
The power that’ll be generated at the Richland Parish datacenter is more than three times the power of a plant Entergy is building for a new Amazon datacenter in Mississippi…
DB2
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Nuclear may be attractive for data processing but timing is a problem. Short term growth requires power sooner. No doubt nuclear will fit in when it is ready.
Any guesses out there on when data center capacity will reach saturation and stop growing? I’d guess at least 10 yrs out.
When everything known to man is digitized. Not in my lifetime. Family tree researchers know courthouses have mountains of documents still to be digitized.
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Big technology companies are reserving turbines — the engines at the heart of gas-fired power plants — for their planned 5-gigawatt data center campuses…In the last 30 days alone, GE Vernova has signed 9 gigawatts of reservations for gas turbines…
While Amazon, Alphabet and Microsoft are all investing in nuclear, that buildout will take years and gas is seen as a key way to meet demand this decade.
Research firm CreditSights recently scaled back its projections for wind and solar growth by 2030 and more than doubled its estimates of gas demand for data center growth over that period.
DB2
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LOL! All these tech companies will be waiting for years and years to get any watts of power out of new or restarted nuclear power plants.
Cheap natural gas has killed new nuclear for the last 20 years. Natural gas and renewables will keep on killing new nuclear for another 10 to 20 years.
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The picture is of the Fukushima nuclear power plants radioactive water storage tanks.
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Big tech does not understand nuclear power cost and schedule. They are smoking something strong to think they can get nuclear power producing electricity for them by 2030.
BOSTON — Meta announced a request for proposals (RFP) on Tuesday, asking energy developers to respond with plans to build 1-4 GW of new nuclear generation capacity to be delivered in the early 2030s. The tech giant wants to use the power for data centers to support energy-intensive artificial intelligence (AI).
The agreement comes on the heels of other large technology companies expressing interest in nuclear. In October, Google announced a partnership with California’s Kairos Power, to buy energy from small nuclear reactors starting in 2030, and Amazon announced that it signed agreements to support the development of new nuclear energy projects. Earlier this fall, Microsoft inked a deal with Constellation Energy that aims to restart the Three Mile Island nuclear plant.